Game
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The unseen animations of Into the Shadows
As I was digging through the Into the Shadows demonstration I was very surprised to see that there were a few animations included that we don’t get to see - or don’t get to see the entirety of.
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A basic introduction to MessiahScript
Before I even begin, I’ve got to thank Rick Gibbed for providing the exact launch parameter that triggers Messiah into rebuilding it’s scripts.
I always found it odd that the scripts were included with the game, despite the fact that their inclusion wasn’t necessary in order for the game to function, and suspected for quite sometime that perhaps the game was intended to be alterable somehow.
Searching through a number of sources gave me absolutely nothing other than lines from the developers stating that support for modifications was under heavy consideration, all the way up to the Messiah’s release - okay, we didn’t get the level editor but we got their proprietary scripting language, but how the hell can we do anything with it?
After contacting Saxs himself, the lead programmer for the game, who confirmed that there was such a launch parameter, it’s great to see that 18 fucking years later there’s finally a way to modify the game.
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Triton's HDV model format
There was a slight delay in publishing this article as I’d hoped to be able to find the time to delve a little deeper into the format, however this hasn’t been the case so I’ve decided to publish my findings thus far.
I really hope these serve as a good foundation for anyone else looking to take a dive into the demonstration. If you’re perhaps interested in continuing this work, you’ll be able to download the models that I’ve extracted from the demonstration here. Additionally I’ve recently published most of my notes regarding the demonstration, which can be found here.
One of my major goals when digging through the Into the Shadows character demonstration was to figure out a way to pull the models out from the game and then identifying them - this proved to be considerably easier than I anticipated, particularly because of the helpful prompts that Triton’s engine provides when loading the format.
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Iron Storm Packages
I know very little of the Iron Storm game, admittedly, but Saturday evening I decided to take a look at the game and wrote a loader for its package format. The package format used in Iron Storm is made up of an LST file, which is basically an index of all the files within the IBF file—the IBF being the actual file that contains the data used by the game.
There isn’t a lot to say about either of these, but I’ve provided the information below for prosperity; hopefully someone will make something neat out of it!
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A closer look at the Unreal Technology Demo
At the European Computer Trade Show, on September 6th 2000, Epic Games unveiled a technology demonstration of the Unreal Engine, showing new features and capabilities that they were introducing to the engine. A number of new features were shown that Epic Games were looking to introduce to the engine in the short term, along with PlayStation 2 support, but with the long term goal of producing a new engine entirely. This iteration of the engine eventually came to be known as the Warfare engine, now known as Unreal Engine 2, the predecessor to Unreal Engine 3.
The technology demonstration was unsurprisingly comprised of a number of different demonstrations but a lot of these provide some fascinating insight into the development of the engine and the upcoming games at the time. We’ll be going over each of these as they appeared in the video below and doing a short analysis on each.
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